Author slithers into bad books

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"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue". And with
that, American author and journalist Tom Wolfe secured one of the
world's least desirable literary accolades. The British prize for
bad sex in fiction.

The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude,
tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual
description in the modern novel".

Wolfe won it for a couple of purple passages from his latest
novel I am Charlotte Simmons, a tale of campus life at an
exclusive US university.

Besides the slither line was this: "But the hand that was what
she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire
terrain of her torso to explore and not just the
otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the
border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of
the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!"

Judges described Wolfe's prose as "ghastly and boring".

The former Washington Post correspondent, whose debut
novel Bonfire of the Vanities was a defining text of the
1980s, fought off stiff competition from 10 other authors including
South African Andre Brink, who, in his novel Before I
Forget describes a woman's vulva as "like a large exotic
mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've
seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea.
No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that
could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly
and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end".

Another writer who only narrowly escaped the prize was Britain's
Nadeem Aslam for his novel Maps for Lost Lovers, a tale of
life in a Muslim community in an English town. "His mouth looked
for the oiled berry," a raunchy passage starts. "The smell of his
armpits was on her shoulders - a flower depositing pollen on a
hummingbird's forehead," another reads.

The winner of the award, organised by the Literary
Review, is given a statuette and a bottle of champagne, but
only if he or she attends the awards. Wolfe is the first writer in
the 12-year history of the awards to decline his invitation.